Samsung and Oculus Team Up for Gear VR

Smartphones, smartbands and now virtual reality headsets – train rides will never be the same again! During a Berlin conference, electronics giant Samsung announced that they’ve collaborated with Oculus to develop the Gear VR, a mobile device that’ll be paired specifically with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4.

The VR headset will utilize the Note 4’s 5.7 inch Super AMOLED display, as well as drawing power and processing needs via micro-USB.  A 60fps pass-through camera (96 degree field-of-view) will be available for you to check on your surroundings, though we don’t recommend leaving it on while walking about.

So far the Gear VR will come pre-loaded with Oculus Home (interface for the Oculus Store), Oculus Cinema (virtual movie theater), and Oculus 360 Videos and Photos for panoramic content. Adding on to that are items such as Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Pacific Rim Jaeger Pilot, IMAX, DreamWorks VR and Cirque du Soleil Media to help flesh out its capabilities.

Of course what we’re really interested in is its gaming potential, and we’re happy to see several titles announced thus far.

One that’ll definitely ring bells is Imangi Studios’ Temple Run VR, putting players in a first-person perspective as they run from an arctic demon monkey across snowy landscapes. There’s also the procedurally-generated hacking game Darknet; an infiltration game from DENA with a working title of Protocol Zero; combat racer Lunasee by Iridium Studios; and a neat-looking space shooter called Gunner by nDreams.

For the developers and early adopters out there, technical specifications for the Gear VR Innovator Edition can be found here, whereas the Oculus Mobile SDK can be acquired at the Oculus Developer Center soon. The Innovator Edition will be available in Frost White sometime this year.

Like the desktop Oculus Rift, we suspect the Gear VR won’t be coming to consumers anytime soon. For now all we can do is sit tight and contemplate a creepy future where your family members look like this every morning:

[Source:  Oculus VR Blog | Photos by Samsung]